On Thursday, Feb. 19, Donovan Schaefer, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, visited Carleton College to present “Twilight of the American Mind: Notes on Religion, AI & Pedagogy,” a lecture about the challenges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to the process of learning and teaching.His talk was hosted as part of the Religion Matters lecture series, a program in the religion department that invites professors to speak on how religion affects and is affected by current events and political issues.
His talk illuminated what is lost when students and teachers use AI without scrutiny. Schaefer described AI as an “affordance” and asserted how its flexible input and output capabilities can promote ease and efficiency. This ease and efficiency, however, is where the problem lies. Schaefer argued that many of the benefits of intellectual inquiry are gained by struggling with the materials. Such struggle can foster intellectual emotions such as frustration from a lack of understanding; joy in forming conclusions from general premises and shock from the diversion of expectations or from general speculation about the direction of the intellectual inquiry.
Schaefer’s lecture described the variety of skills that students are and have been losing as a result of allowing or failing to inhibit the impact of affordances, such as AI, on student learning. Schaefer said, “AI threatens the cultivation of intellectual inquiry.”
Owen Xue ’27 was especially struck by Schaefer’s articulation that thinking is feeling. During the lecture, Schaefer referenced a point from his book that described how interest, which can follow an experience of learning or deep thought, should be considered an intellectual emotion.
This idea encouraged Xue to consider the undermined role of intellectual emotions in academic pursuit and conclude that “abstraction from emotions is emphasized in favor of reason, [which] is emphasized when they usually coincide.” Xue said, “We are in a transformative age, and AI is one of the most powerful tools to come out of intellectual inquiry.”
At the same time, “Totally banning AI would be shortsighted, and being AI-illiterate probably isn’t ideal for job prospects either,” said Xue.
This sentiment was articulated in the question-and-answer session following the lecture. Several questions stemmed from Schaefer’s arguments that AI is detrimental to the ultimate goal of humanistic education, which is the formation of the self and a well-rounded thought process and to the growing unavoidability of AI, making it crucial to job prospects after college. Xue and others pointed out that, by avoiding AI, students might be harming “AI literacy,” a skill that may be crucial in the future.
For professors who might be requiring or encouraging AI use in assignments, Schaefer noted the importance of understanding the viewpoints of students who choose to avoid AI usage. He stressed the value of open forums between students and professors. For example, the Religion Matters forum, an opportunity for students and faculty to engage with current religious studies issues, allows students and professors to come together and speak openly about AI usage.
An anonymous student highlighted that there seems to be an AI bubble forming as many high-net-worth organizations funnel money into AI efforts. Many people may experience losses if AI does not rise to meet investors’ expectations. Schaefer argued that companies’ investment in AI and desire for its success might slant the conversation regarding AI as companies encourage more people to use it. One of the most crucial areas where investors see growth in AI usage is in schools and universities; thus, conversations like his lecture become all the more important.
The student echoed his sentiment, saying, “It’s hard to know what to trust nowadays with all the self-interest running through our society.”
During the talk, Schaefer argued that some of the agents tasked with guiding students throughout their intellectual endeavors are themselves investors in AI. He reflected on his experience with AI investors on the Board of Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, who have a vested interest in the university’s students, staff and faculty utilizing AI as much as possible. As a result, students at the university may have encountered apps that try to get them to use AI for tasks that do not require it.
The anonymous student also remarked about the benefits of intellectual emotions, saying that, “Perhaps the benefits of these intellectual emotions in reading and writing may become a thing of the past, and with AI, intellectual emotions may begin to look different.”
Schaefer ended his lecture by prefacing that the future of AI is inevitable, but uncertain. He believes that AI “is not going to completely go away,” but the extent to which it will be present in schools, the workplace and other areas of life is yet to be determined. In his view, it is of the utmost importance for both students and professors to articulate, as often and as loudly as possible, what they want the future of AI to look like in their classrooms.
